Third Man in Havana by Tom Rodwell

Author:Tom Rodwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cricket, travel, humour
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2012-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

8

Sri Lanka – Where Cricket is Life

Being asked to help rebuild the lives of children in Sri Lanka as a result of our successes elsewhere was yet another big challenge. Not only had these children had to cope with the terrible tsunami which had caused such devastation, but the civil war too had cost thousands of lives and left many homeless and orphaned. This was a chance to see if cricket could help those who had lost everything.

And yet it wasn’t always thus. The devastation that befell Sri Lanka in the late 20th and early 21st centuries through a killing combination of man-made and natural disasters is in sharp contrast to its much more peaceful and placid past. Marco Polo called it ‘the finest island of its size in the world’, and when visiting Sri Lanka Gandhi said that ‘the natural scenery I see around me is probably unsurpassed on the face of the earth’. Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, as it was previously called, has attracted rave reviews throughout history.

Over the centuries its beauty and natural resources attracted many adventurers to the island, including three colonial powers – the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. This colonial polyglot melting pot prompted George Bernard Shaw to say: ‘I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.’

Its reputation in the cricketing world has always been as a place that, like its near neighbour India, is cricket crackers. Sir Pelham Warner imperiously stated in the 1920s, ‘There is no finer place in the British Empire where cricket is played more enthusiastically and in a finer spirit than Ceylon.’

The British Empire is obviously the historical reason for this, as generations of British colonial administrators and tea planters – the latter including Sir Colin Cowdrey’s father – developed the game and passed on their enthusiasm. Many Ceylonese players used to come to England to ply their trade, and at Leicestershire’s Grace Road, Clive Inman and Stanley Jayasinghe are fondly remembered by myself and other old codgers from the 1960s.

At the other end of the professional cricketing spectrum, English and Australian Test teams used to break their long sea voyages with games in Colombo, the capital, although it took until 1981 for Sri Lanka to be accepted as a Test nation. That should have presaged a happy future, but sadly from then on Sri Lanka began to suffer, first from the 30-year Tamil/Singhalese civil war, which cost over 100,000 lives, and then from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which took 30,000 lives. For such a seemingly joyful place and people, it’s also a sad fact that the suicide bomb, now such a common feature on the news, was invented in Sri Lanka.

It has been said that perhaps only cricket has kept the country together through these difficult times. Against all the odds, Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996, with new stars such as Ranatunga, Jayasuriya and Muralitharan playing the game as it had never been played before.

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